R&D CENTER

MtSuri.net: Web-based flora database for the flora and forest vegetation of Mt. Suri

Yongsung Kim1,2, Juhyeon Kim1,2,P, Hakgu Kang1, Kyoungin Heo1, Kumsoon Lee3, Sangtae Lee4, Xi Hong1,2, Jihun Yeon1, Jongsun Park1,2,3,*
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Flora of Mt. Suri surrounded by four cities near Seoul, Korea have been investigated since 1996. To understand its flora in detail, we investigated flora of Mt. Suri using the Biodiversity Observation Database (BODB; http://www.biodiversitydb.org/). With the aid of BODB and 10 para-taxonomists, we collected 1,502 plant instances with GPS (1,418 instances) and live pictures as well as 220 specimens identifying 433 species in total, which is the second largest number of species among the eight previous studies. Experts identified 313 species from approximately half of investigated plants and para-taxonomists contributed to the addition of 120 species. 63 taxa were newly identified in comparison to the previous studies, presenting that more plant species may exist in Mt. Suri. Collected data from our study can be freely browsed in the web-based database for flora and forest vegetation of Mt. Suri (http://flora.mtsuri.net/). It provides high-resolution images of 220 specimens supported by InfoBoss Herbarium (http://herbarium.infoboss.co.kr/), live plant pictures with GPS coordination, distribution maps, and local weather data since 2009 with several statistics. Our attempts to apply new methods to investigation, to provide live plant pictures with the aid of para-taxonomists, and to construct the integrated flora database will altogether establish a new model for the next level of flora investigation.